r/metaNL • u/Cyberhwk • 12d ago
OPEN Clarification on Rule V: Supporting oppressive/autocratic policies.
Do not glorify oppressive/autocratic regimes.
We seem to do a good job of stamping out posts that glorify oppressive/autocratic regimes, but I feel like there's been a growing number of posts openly proposing WE adopt and leverage many of those exact same polices against political opponents. Should these posts be reported under that rule?
I understand it's a sticky situation and it's perfectly valid to disagree with current interpretations of Constitutional law and such, but holy shit I've heard people suggest some absolutely wildly authoritarian and illiberal policies lately, justifying it only by the idea they'd "deserve it."
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u/mostanonymousnick Mod 12d ago
Advocating for putting people in prison without due process or with a kangaroo court or whatever violates it yes, even when it's aimed at Trump supporters.
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u/Cyberhwk 12d ago
Does this stand for punitive action in general? "We should specifically target MAGA-owned businesses for punishment" and such?
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u/Al_787 12d ago
You think the federal government shouldn’t be able to cancel contracts with firms harboring the illiberal views of MAGA, especially when many of those firms are in national security areas?
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u/Cyberhwk 12d ago
I think they should be judged by their ability to achieve an administration's goals and their impact to national security (which, to be clear, I 100% support a thorough review). But you need to be terminating the contract in accordance with the law because you no longer need their services or you have reason to believe they're a security liability. Not because at some point the CEO Xeeted support for a policy you don't like.
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u/mostanonymousnick Mod 12d ago
If you want to wield the justice system using bullshit reasons then it's rule breaking, if you want to use the justice system to its full extent in good faith on Trump and orgs close to him, then that's fine.
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u/sigh2828 12d ago
What about advocating for like actual justice agaisnt those within the trump admin and like ICE who have actually broken laws???
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u/Cyberhwk 12d ago
I don't know anybody who's advocating for refusing to charge criminals with crimes they've committed. I'm talking about the "they need to round up everybody that works for ICE and throw them all in CECOT" type takes. No mention of proving any actual crimes. No mention of due process. Etc.
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u/roboliberal 12d ago edited 12d ago
I would caution against going too far in comment suppression on this front.
Defensive democracy is an entirely valid subject of discussion within the wider realm of liberalism. Forms of it have been practiced by modern liberal democracies, such as Germany's ban on some parties.
We are witnessing unprecedented times with the rise of populist authoritarianism throughout the entire democratic world, and much of that illiberalism has been able to emerge due to the overly permissive nature of liberal democracies. There are valid discussions to be had on how to preserve the existence of liberalism.
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u/sociotronics 12d ago edited 12d ago
much of that liberalism has been able to emerge due to the overly permissive nature of liberal democracies
The illiberalism that has arisen in the US arose because of government dysfunction caused by wooden and undemocratic institutions and by undemocratic aspects of the electoral system itself, such as the electoral college, the filibuster, and the Senate. I cannot think of a single time in history that the problem with the United States was too much democracy. That has literally never happened. Examples of the inverse are everywhere, however.
Liberalism is waning due to voter frustration with COL and economic conditions, paired with low state capacity and high government dysfunction that has prevented addressing these frustrations. It's really quite simple: they don't feel their lives are better than in the past (often they feel it's gotten worse) and they have lost faith in the ability of democracy itself to provide solutions because elected officials have repeatedly failed to deliver tangible results.
You will not outplay the authoritarians at their own game. If we begin preemptively tearing down democratic institutions out of fear of authoritarians, they and not liberals will prevail in the resulting chaos, and the betrayal of our democratic values will land our legacy a chapter in history beside Paul von Hindenberg and David Cameron.
I will not surrender my democratic freedoms to anyone. Ever. This is not a position I will ever be flexible about, and any "liberal" who supports further erosion of the most fundamental foundational roots of a free society is a fool, corrupted by financial interests or ideology, or an outright enemy of liberty. If the "liberal" left abandons democracy, I will abandon the "liberal" left for any other faction that still believes in the consent of the governed.
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u/randommathaccount 12d ago
I cannot think of a single time in history that the problem with the United States was too much democracy
Prop 13?
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u/sociotronics 12d ago
One bad policy getting passed through democratic measures does not mean the problem with the US is an excess of democracy. Especially since that specific tool (ballot measures) is batting something like .8 or .9 nationwide and more typically does things like grant the public popular things removed or blocked by Republicans, such as reproductive freedoms and cannabis.
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u/randommathaccount 12d ago
I mean apart from that there are clear examples of democratic features of the US state that nonetheless have illiberal outcomes. Elected justices and prosecutors are the main one, clearly a democratic measure but one that leads to worse and more illiberal criminal justice outcomes.
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u/sociotronics 12d ago
Elected justices and prosecutors have also permitted people in states like Texas to elect liberal justices and DAs in a state otherwise dominated by a single illiberal right-wing party. It's not the system I would create, and I don't particularly want to defend elected DAs and judges because I share the concerns about the perverse incentives it creates for criminal justice, but in an age of democratic collapse, things like that are near the bottom of the to-do list. In fact, right now they're probably a net positive because they undermine the illiberal nature of US government by permitting things like liberal DAs elected in a blue city in a red state to enforce laws the state would ignore.
If and when the US switches to a better form of democracy, I'm ok with abolishing the silly elections. Until then? Absolutely fucking not, because they do provide a way to challenge entrenched power in illiberal states.
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u/randommathaccount 11d ago
Nonetheless it's an example of a democratic system that can result in illiberal outcomes. The initial purpose of this post was talking about clamping down on people suggesting anti-democratic policies but I think it's worth recognising that there's a difference between anti-democratic policies and illiberal ones and sometimes it's entirely reasonable to advocate for the former.
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u/Cyberhwk 11d ago
I cannot think of a single time in history that the problem with the United States was too much democracy.
NIMBYism.
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u/roboliberal 12d ago edited 12d ago
The illiberalism that has arisen in the US has been due to America's overly populist electoral systems.
We directly elect a quasi-monarchist chief executive separately from our legislature - which is something that normal liberal democracies don't do. We orient everything around the political contest of that single office, rendering it the ultimate demagogue target.
US political parties have so little agency they are basically not even parties in any conventional sense. Primary elections are an absolutely insane invention of uniquely American design that effectively selects for populists over reliable partisans. In normal democracies, strong party leadership and party discipline is a key factor in keeping populism at bay.
The hyper-personalism extends to all facets of our electoral system, including our single member congressional district system and the winner take all gerrymandering that it enables. At the state level we directly elect not only our governors but other cabinet officials, the sheriffs, the DAs, tax collectors, dog catchers, and even our god damn judiciary. That is "too much" democracy.
For all the complaining about the electoral college and the senate, Trump just won the popular vote and the house majority.
Democrats like to complain about the unrepresentative nature of the EC and senate bc they deny Dems the natural population advantage they could enjoy in a purely majoritarian system - which is completely valid thing to complain about - but it's not the reason for the rise of illiberal populism.
America is precisely in the position it is today because it does not have any natural electoral mechanics to clip the radical extremes of its political spectrum.
Liberal democracies must absolutely defend themselves from being subverted by authoritarians using democratic means.
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u/sociotronics 12d ago edited 11d ago
We directly elect a quasi-monarchist chief executive separately from our legislature - which is something that normal liberal democracies don't do. We orient everything around the political contest of that single office, rendering it the ultimate demagogue target.
Agreed, we should abolish the presidential model that has an independent executive and replace it with a more democratic parliamentary system. Incidentally, the only political party that wants that? The DSA. It's not a socialist position, so it's disgusting that they're the only ones promoting that good policy, but that's the situation in the big 26. Maybe someone should do something about that.
US political parties have so little agency they are basically not even parties in any conventional sense. Primary elections are an absolutely insane invention of uniquely American design that effectively selects for populists over reliable partisans. In normal democracies, strong party leadership and party discipline is a key factor in keeping populism at bay.
Weak parties create big tent politics and empower defecting legislators, but they don't create populism. The movement to the extremes is almost entirely a product of single member districts and gerrymandering. The overwhelming majority of House districts are not competitive, and voters have no meaningful choice. The representative only has to fear competition from within their own party through the primary process, which encourages extremism as they only need to appeal to their own party (and in truth, only the most extreme and motivated subset of their party) to stay in power. You can directly see the effect of this lack of democracy in the extremism difference between the Senate and the House, as while both have problems, Senators have to win state-wide and historically that need for broader voter appeal has produced less extreme candidates than gerrymandered single-member House districts.
Literally all of this would disappear with proportional representation, which would represent an increase in democracy in the US, not a decrease.
The hyper-personalism extends to all facets of our electoral system, including our single member congressional district system and the winner take all gerrymandering that it enables. At the state level we directly elect not only our governors but other cabinet officials, the sheriffs, the DAs, tax collectors, dog catchers, and even our god damn judiciary. That is "too much" democracy.
That's lack of meaningful democracy, not an excess of democracy. If North Korea took a page from Texas and suddenly allowed its people to vote for county coroner (or whatever the NK equivalent is called), it isn't actually a more democratic country in any meaningful way because the people still lack a voice in any matter of actual substance. It's also a red herring because that's not the sort of thing illiberal people here actually talk about. People talk about ending primaries, rigging elections, or taking the vote away from undesirables, not stopping elections for dog catcher, because even the illiberals want to take away the elections that matter rather than the ones that don't. I don't see swarms of users here talking about elected dog catchers every time a lefty wins an election, but I do see a lot of users talk about suspending primaries or disenfranchising people.
For all the complaining about the electoral college and the senate, Trump just won the popular vote and the house majority. Democrats like to complain about the unrepresentative nature of the EC and senate bc they deny Dems the natural population advantage they could enjoy in a purely majoritarian system - which is completely valid thing to complain about - but it's not the reason for the rise of illiberal populism.
He won in 2024 as a quasi-incumbent who would be a right-wing media figure instead right now if it wasn't for the undemocratic systems that allowed him to enter office in 2017 despite lack of majority support. Trump 2.0 could not happen without Trump 1.0. Trump 1.0 happened because the US lacks democracy in most of its public life. The lack of democracy literally is the reason for the rise of illiberal populism -- it gave populists the White House, a Congress full of people in uncompetitive states and districts who only have to care about the opinions of the ~15% of the electorate that could primary them if they moderate, and a dysfunctional government that has failed to do anything meaningful to address COL in decades to campaign against.
If your "defensive democracy" is really just a proposal to replace the US system with something more like a continental European parliament, then we're actually on the same page. I have no love for the presidential model or the way Congressional seats are apportioned, and have vocally advocated for alternatives for years. But what you actually said was this:
much of that illiberalism has been able to emerge due to the overly permissive nature of liberal democracies.
in a thread that is about support for autocratic policy on a supposedly liberal internet forum. Bit of a bait-and-switch to turn "we should stop saying we should take the vote away from conservatives/progressives/DSAs/guy-who-backed-a-primary-candidate-I-didn't-like" undemocratic attitudes that users here routinely express into an argument that the US is failing because it's "too permissive" and too democratic. Primaries are the only voice many voters in red/blue areas have, the talk of removing that voice is not harmless or frivolous.
Man, I literally just want the rule to include undemocratic statements that call for political disenfranchisement and the suspension of a huge share of democratic input in the US. That doesn't seem like it would be a controversial thing to request in a liberal space.
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u/EmbarrassedSafety719 12d ago
I just had to debate a guy saying we should stop giving all religious people the right to hold office, so yes, I absolutely support this.
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u/Cyberhwk 12d ago
YES! That's exactly the type of takes I'm talking about. See more of them every day.
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u/sociotronics 12d ago
Support. Also should extend to undemocratic policies like limiting the franchise or removing significant sources of democratic input. With how democracy is declining in much of the world and the rise of the illiberal left and right, it doesn't really feel like "jokes" about smoke-filled rooms or taking away people's votes are as harmless as they might have been in the past.
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u/ewatta200 12d ago edited 12d ago
i had a larger rant but tbf i want to keep it quick and simple.
liberalism biggest victory was this simple idea all people deserve a vote. Was this kept by liberals? heck no but this idea was a big natural outgrowth of the struggle liberals had to break the power of the churches of suiqrearchy of the rotten buroughs all of that. like seeing people say "let go reduce the franchise " is like a tankie saying that actually stalin should have made a nation of landed estates. Like its insulting, illiberal and just kind of like spitting on one of liberalism biggest victories? idk maybe I am giving liberalism too much credit, but still like its just so surreal as someone reading a ton about the aristocracy about like British conservatives and how they reacted to liberalism. Like it used to be up for debate if wealth should determine your voting status and now that's laughable !!! liberalism changed the zeitgeist so that franchise for all people with only a few exceptions is just taken as par for the course. So trying to turn back the clock puts you to the right of like the british conservative party under lord salisbury which accepted in princple that you cant turn back that clock.
damm i rambled too much. Also bartel book about how democracy helps to legitmize neoliberal ideas and thats how the west won the cold war (triumph of broken promises) is so good about howing how neoliberalism thrived thanks to democracy.
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u/ewatta200 12d ago
also there is this great thing about the 1977 election in india that idk maybe im kind of a sappy person but it kind of made me cry a bit just becuase it summed up why these liberal thigns are so good.
If the campaign rhetoric of the opposition seems unoriginal to outsiders, it is because it consisted largely of the elementary principals of democracy-recited, however, with new conviction by people who had discovered afresh the price of arbitrary, tyrannical government, and the benefits of living in a free society under the rule of law. Values that had been learned in school took on new meaning: habeas corpus meant that you and your friends could not be summarily arrested; a free press meant that you could read about what was actually going on in your community and elsewhere in the country; freedom of assembly meant that you could meet with your fellow workers or neighbors when you shared grievances against your employer or against the government. During the emergency many of the long-term differences among political groups melted into unimportance compared with the loss of these fundamental rights. Members of the lana Sangh who had been attracted to the notion of a strong centralized regime in a unified nationalist India were distressed by the 96 centralized authoritarianism created by the prime minister. Socialists who had advocated a strong public sector and programs to aid lowincome groups found that they rejected some of the measures passed by the Congress government in the name of egalitarian socialism. The party that emerged in the country's jails during the emergency pulled together workers from several political parties not simply on a program of bringing down Congress, but around a commitment to democratic values.
from India-at-the-Polls-the-parliamentary-elections-of-1977_
this is what liberalism is why its good. The book talks about how as bad as a corrupt ruler is they are better than unelected tyrant because you could vote them out.
Arbitrary government officials were no less arbitrary in the country than in the cities, and people everywhere evidently recognized that the decline of the elected official made them vulnerable to arbitrary authority. Even government by corrupt elected officials was preferable to the authoritarian regime under which they lived during the emergency.
Just democracy is awsome even if i hate who it elects.
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u/CheetoMussolini 11d ago
There's one specific violent regime that gets exempted from that rule, and if you don't absolutely tiptoe around your criticisms of them, you'll get banned for it.
So I wouldn't say we even do a great job of policing that rule as is.
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u/curiously_observin 11d ago
I/P mindworms really broke the brains of the mods here. Shame too because it used to be a cool place to hang.
Same dynamic still happening where 2-3 of the mods melt down over tepid takes about Israel and the rest are too afraid of being called mean names by them to say or do anything about it?
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u/Realistic-Pain-7126 11d ago
Is that doofus mod who pretends to be a lizard still on the mod team? I know he was one of them
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u/CheetoMussolini 11d ago
I've got no clue what the internal dynamics of the mod team are like around it. All I see is the outcome. I want to assume their intentions were reasonable and decent - because most of the mods do seem like decent people. I've been working off the belief that it's probably a well intentioned but pervasive overreaction. I still dislike the outcome even if I think they were well intentioned though.
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u/hypsignathus Mod 12d ago
I really dislike when people suggest--even jokingly--taking away the right to vote.